


Many Hands Make Light Work

by elizajane



Series: Let Your Indulgence Set Me Free [3]
Category: Haven - Fandom
Genre: Episode Tag, Episode: s02e06 Audrey Parker's Day Off, Longing, Masturbation, Multi, Unresolved Sexual Tension, Wet Dream
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-20
Updated: 2015-02-20
Packaged: 2018-03-13 20:51:27
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,545
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3395927
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elizajane/pseuds/elizajane
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It’s a gesture that cracks open possibilities Audrey hadn’t, until now, known she was looking for.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Many Hands Make Light Work

**Author's Note:**

> For Maz, in thanks for the encouragement to keep on watching and keep on writing.
> 
> Thanks to Crowgirl for the beta. All missteps are my own.

At first, Audrey thinks it must be the exhaustion and terror catching up with her. Because she can’t have seen what she’s pretty sure she just saw: Glancing back toward the bar just in time to catch Nathan’s gesture -- reaching up with a finger traced along Duke’s jaw, pulling Duke’s attention away from the magnetism of Chris’ presence.

_For real?_

Okay, so it had probably been a little mean girl of her not to mention Chris’ affliction to Duke earlier. But she’d been more preoccupied with saving their lives. And she had to admit that part of her just found it amusing to watch Duke fawn. But Nathan had snapped him out of it with the lightest touch, over almost before she’s registered it, the slightest incline as he says something to Duke she can’t hear over the evening breeze.

“I’m sorry about the guy downtown. . .” Chris is saying, trying to be kind, trying to connect. The part of her that’s still functioning can see he’s trying. She’s so tired. It feels like she’s been awake for a week. And all she can see -- all she’s been seeing on loop since it happened -- is the light going out of Nathan’s eyes, the blood smeared across Duke’s face.

She watches Chris’ mouth move, notes the lines of concern around his eyes. Thinks about the tenderness in Nathan’s caress, the tilt of Duke’s head as he turned in toward the other man. Chris needs someone who will reach for him like that, she thinks. _How do you take days off from the people you love?_ she wonders. She watches Chris’ mouth move but his earnest words aren’t making sense.

Not the way Nathan and Duke make sense.

At first, she thinks it must be the exhaustion, the terror at almost losing -- at having lost -- both of them in the same day that makes it impossible for her to stop thinking about the gesture. There had been something tender, something easy, something shockingly knowing about Nathan’s touch -- for a man who didn’t touch casually, the casual way in which he’d stroked Duke’s jaw crackles across the edge of her sight like lightning on the distant horizon.

It’s a gesture that cracks open possibilities Audrey hadn’t, until now, known she was looking for.

She should be thinking about Chris, who’s standing right there in front of her, trying to be twenty-first century cool about how the Troubles ruined this fantasy day he planned. Cool with how she never fails to put her work above their relationship; cool with how she’s put other … relationships … ahead of theirs. But she’s not. She’s really not. Instead, she’s distracted by the thought of Nathan’s index finger against the line of Duke’s five o’clock shadow, belying the fact that even now she’s got other things in her life that are taking precedence above Chris, and Chris can see it in her eyes.

He just hasn’t let himself understand what he’s seeing.

She should help him. Somehow.

There’s a twisted intimacy in holding someone as they die. This isn’t the first time Audrey’s felt someone’s death in her hands, but it is the first time (during the life she can remember) that she’s held someone whose loss shatters her so thoroughly.

Chris shouldn’t have someone standing in front of him who’d seen him fucking die that day, someone who’s been sleeping with him, been having tender and joyous sex with him, but who still can’t stop thinking about the way her vision had fractured, the way her bones had begun to melt, the way her skin peeled back exposing a maw of grief when Duke was gone beneath her hands; the way sound howled in her ears, the piercing pain that split her head in two, the screaming void that opened at the center of her chest when Nathan’s eyes lost the light of _alive_ and _there_.

Maybe it’s the exhaustion and terror making it possible for her to see. Holding them both in death, maybe now she can see them in life in ways she’s been cataloging but failing to truly _attend_ to: the line of a gaze, the tilt of a head, the pitch of a voice.

Perhaps the intimacy of death has attuned her to the intimacy of life.

She knows, now, with a certainty she’s learned to trust, that Duke and Nathan are -- or, at least, have been -- lovers. Maybe it was a rocky on-again, off-again thing; maybe they’ve fought over Duke’s business interests; maybe they’ve reached an impasse over Nathan’s anger. Maybe they had foundered on Duke’s leaving, Duke’s returning, Duke’s marriage. Nathan’s staying, Nathan’s career, Nathan’s silences. Maybe they haven’t fucked since high school -- maybe they’ll fall asleep in each other’s arms that night. Whatever it’s been, however it is, the point is: Nathan is comfortable touching Duke.

Which means he’s _used_ to touching Duke.

Maybe it’s the exhaustion wearing off, maybe it’s the lust rushing in as the ebb tide of terror, that fuels her dreams. In the indeterminate darkness of deep night Audrey wakes tangled in the sheets: frightened she’s returned to Tuesday’s horror show, ramped up with desire. A patchwork of dreamscape images chase themselves across the back of her retinas, weave the taste of desire across the back of her tongue. 

 _Duke, at the bar, leaning into Nathan’s hand. She’s both watching and feeling, Nathan’s palm warm against Duke’s cheek, his fingers curling into the black curls at the nape of Duke’s neck. She can feel Nathan’s mouth on Duke’s lips, or are they hers? She’s kissing Duke, kissing Nathan,_ is _Duke kissing Nathan. She’s sandwiched between them, feels Duke pressed against her back, arches against his shoulder as Nathan’s lips move down her neck--_

Audrey can still feel them, pressed against her overhot skin. The part of her that’s fully awake, the part of her that sought out the electric-green glow of the clock face (1:57), knows they’re not with her. Duke is asleep on his boat. Nathan is asleep in his apartment across town. Unless they’re asleep, together, in one location or another. An option that hadn’t, until this evening, fully entered her consciousness.

But now she’s woken to _them, together_ and clearly the notion is there to stay.

She can feel Nathan pressed against her chest as the cotton sheet pulls taut across her breasts, the front of his shirt against her bare skin. In the dark she imagines how it would feel, the tense and stretch of his abdominals, if he braced himself against the bar and leaned forward to kiss Duke over her shoulder.

She can feel Duke’s arms cradling her, close on either side of her ribcage as his hands come up to pull Nathan toward them, into them, by the belt loops of his jeans. Her palms tingle with the phantom heat of Nathan’s skin as she imagines rucking his shirt, shoving greedy questing clutching hands up beneath the cloth, how Duke’s nimble fingers will chase after. 

She’s restless and aching, can hear her own pulse echo in her ears fast and hard. Her hunger for them is filling her mouth. She _wants_ : tongues and teeth and touch, all tangled together by lust and the underlying heat and sure steadyness of love. Until the day before she’d have said “love” and meant fondness, attachment, loyalty, friendship. Now she knows it’s a love running fierce and wild in her veins, a love that will never be satisfied until they’re _this_ close, _this_ honest, _this_ raw, _this_ whole.

By the time her fingers slip between her folds, her thighs are already slick with arousal. She’s almost painful to the touch, blood pounding beneath the palm of her hand, three fingers slipped inside, thumb pressed alongside the shaft and nub of her clit. She curls up into her hand, rocking hard, thumb and forefinger of her other hand twisting her nipple painfully rough. She can imagine Duke’s hand down her panties, long deft fingers curling in and out, imagine Nathan’s palms against her breasts, his teeth nipping at the full flesh of her lip. She’s got her ass pressed back into Duke’s lap, a thigh wedged between Nathan’s legs -- she wonders if he’d be able to feel her beneath the denim of his blue jeans -- can practically taste the whiskey on his breath.

She can feel it building deep in her belly, presses up from the hips, heels braced against the mattress as every muscle goes rigid and even her pulse seems to cease for the space of a breath, then two, and three.

Heat blooms over her skin, a fine sweat that makes her shove the bedding down and away. Her limbs are uncoordinated, heavy. Audrey allows the honeyed languidness of post-coital contentment to spread outward from low in her belly, warm tendrils pushing out into the tips of her toes, the edge of each fingernail.

She lays awake in the dark, listening to the slowing beat of her heart. It echoes against her eardrums, and for a moment, then two, she imagines she can feel other heartbeats against her skin, the exhalation of breath, the weight of sex-heavy limbs.

Just for a moment, and then they're gone.

Yet here, wrapped in the cocoon of night, anything feels possible.

**Author's Note:**

> I've an intense need, right now, to have something in my life that isn't part of my professional or other adulting responsibilities -- and apparently my brain has decided fic will be that thing. So lucky you if you're one of those people who enjoys my porn :)
> 
> I'm brewing a get-together fic for these three that will resolve all the UST in the inevitable and felicitous fashion. So if you enjoyed this one, think good thoughts for the inspiration sprites and the time fairy over coming weeks!


End file.
